When I was very young, maybe three or four, my mom asked me to carry some glass bottles up concrete steps leading up to a neighbors house. On the first step I tripped and dropped the bottle and it shattered. My mother was very upset with me, but she let me try again. This time, I was so nervous that I would drop the bottle, that it slipped through my fingers and broke. She was furious. She yelled at me. I don’t remember exactly what she said but it made me feel like she thought I had intentionally broken the bottle just to upset her. There was no way to prove that wasn’t true. It was the first time I felt trapped behind a lie about myself that I couldn’t prove wrong.

I realize now that I’ve been trying to prove that wasn’t me my whole life. The selfish person who would intentionally hurt another. Turns out, my family won’t see me any other way.

I took my whole family to therapy to figure out which steps everyone was taking to create the destructive dance we have been moving to our whole lives. I was called “unforgiving.”

I asked my mom one thing she would change about herself so that I would know for sure that she was capable of dancing a new, healthy step. I was called a “brooding teenager.”

I sent my father an email asking why he hadn’t spoken to me for two months and hadn’t even tried to see his grandchild in that time. I was called “critical.”

My husband sent my parents an email trying to explain why things are as they are now, how we never got an apology after we were told time and time again (falsely) that something was wrong with our child. He ended the email wishing them love and light and courage. He was called “disrespectful.”

There is nothing I can do to convince them that I am a nice person who is trying to help them not out of malice but out of love. There is nothing I can show them to prove to them that love is about growth and becoming healthy in how we relate to one another. That I want them in my life but I want us all to treat each other with genuine love.

To them I will always be selfish, critical, judgmental, and unforgiving. I will always be the little girl who shattered a glass bottle on purpose. And I don’t want to be treated like her anymore. Because as many times as they convince themselves it’s true, as many stories they construct so that I’m the villain, it will never be true. And I want to live in truth. I want my child to see me living in truth. The little girl inside me is tired of shouting out to her family that they’ve got her wrong. I am not a bottle breaker, I am a truth teller.